Undergraduate English Spring 2003 Course Descriptions

Undergraduate English Summer 2012 Course Descriptions
Updated: 03-19-12
ENGL-UA 163 World Literature in English: Colonialism and Its Aftermaths
This course focuses on World Literature produced in the context of colonialism and its aftermaths. We will read
texts situated in a variety of international locations including the U.K., France, New Zealand, Nigeria, China, India,
Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the U.S. Students will have the opportunity to think about how colonial power
has shaped both the way we see the world and the way we read literature today. Beginning with Shakespeare and
Jane Austen and moving toward Junot Díaz and Edwidge Danticat, we will examine issues pertaining to gender and
sexuality, slavery and capitalism, religion and cultural identity, and space and privilege in the colonial and
postcolonial imaginary. How do these authors write ‘across worlds’ at the same time as they are creating ‘new
worlds’? What are the tensions that arise between the First and Third Worlds, between the North and the South,
and the East and the West? How and why were these geographic distinctions invented? Texts include
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Wole Soyinka’s Death and
the King’s Horseman, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Arundhati Roy’s The God of
Small Things, and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. Readings from theorists including Edward Said,
Stuart Hall, and Judith Butler will supplement our study. There are no prerequisites to this course. All are
welcome.
Course Days/Times: TWR, 1:00-3:10PM, Second Session Instructor: Laurie Lambert
ENGL-UA 180 Writing New York: The Downtown Scene 1960-1980
This course examines the relationship between literary writing and visual and performance arts in New York's
"Downtown Scene," roughly from 1960-1980. We will pay special attention to relationships between poetry, music
scenes, and performance art (e.g. "Happenings," Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable) in the 1960s, the emergence
of NYC punk (the CBGB's scene, etc.), minimalism in downtown painting and avant-garde composition, and
relationships between underground theater and the performance of gender and sexuality post-Stonewall. Readings
will include poetry and criticism from the Beats and New York School (including material from downtown small
presses, much of which is housed at NYU's Fales Library), Yoko Ono's Grapefruit, Don DeLillo's Great Jones
Street, Jim Carroll's Forced Entries, as well as some recent looks backward at the period, such as Legs McNeil's
Please Kill Me and Patti Smith's Just Kids. Music listening will include work by The Fugs, The Velvet
Underground, Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell, The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Arthur Russell, Wayne
County, Terry Riley, Steve Reich. Discussion of visual art by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Claes Oldenburg, Walter de
Maria, Andy Warhol and others. Films will include Robert Frank and Al Leslie's Pull My Daisy, Amos Poe's Blank
Generation, Matt Wolf's Wild Combination and Ric Burns's Andy Warhol.
**TWO WEEK INTENSIVE COURSE, WILL RUN FROM MAY 21 ST - JUNE 4 TH **
Course Days/Times: MTWRF, 12:30-4:00PM, First Session Instructor: Bryan Waterman
ENGL-UA 210 British Literature I
This course is designed to give you a broad sense of the literary tradition in Britain from the Anglo-Saxon period
(8th century) to the English Civil War (mid-17th century). Among the many texts we’ll be reading are the epics
Beowulf and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the plays
Mankind, Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and poems by William
Shakespeare, John Donne, Mary Wroth, George Herbert, and Philip Sidney.
Course Days/Times: MTR, 1:15-3:25PM, First Session Instructor: Alina Romo
ENGL-UA 220 British Literature II
This course surveys major works of British poetry, prose, drama, and fiction from the Restoration to the early
twentieth century. In addition to performing close textual analysis, we will pay particular attention to literary genres

Updated: 03-19-12
and consider how kinds of writing mediated writers' responses to shifting political, cultural, and technological
conditions. In lectures, class discussions, and written assignments, students will develop their close-reading and
critical writing skills.
Course Days/Times: MTW 9:15-11:25AM, Second Session Instructor: Rebecca Starkins
ENGL-UA 230 American Literature I
Beginning with the European exploration of the Americas through the eve of the Civil War, this course offers a
broad survey of the texts, concepts, and authors understood as integral to the evolution of an American literary
culture. In the course, students will explore the contested contact zones created by colonial settlement, the political
unity as well as the fissures produced by the War for Independence, the rise of a nascent national culture in relation
to an increasingly globalized world, and finally the politically contentious and aesthetically effulgent explosion of
texts called the “American Renaissance.” Looking at these political and cultural moments will lead us to examine
how texts represent acts of religious devotion, encounters between European and Native American cultures,
negotiations of gender and sexuality, the rise of sentimentality and domestic ideology, responses to slavery and
abolition as well as the development of Transcendentalist philosophies of art and citizenship. Students will read a
number of texts generally recognized as classics of American literature—Franklin’s Autobiography, Douglass’s
Narrative of the Life, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—as well as an array of marginally canonical texts, ranging
from Native American oral narratives, to sentimental novels, to William Apess's political tracts. Evaluation of
students’ progress will include several short written exercises, a longer essay, and a cumulative final exam.
Course Days/Times: TWR, 9:15-11:25AM, First Session Instructor: Bridget McFarland
ENGL-UA 252 Topics: Global Modernism
This class considers case studies in a global history of modernism in relation to two competing models of place: the
ethnographic turn toward place that began in the late eighteenth century and continues in a wide array of projects
today and, on the other hand, the idea of frictionless internationalism manifest in early twentieth-century
modernism, and perhaps most of all in the slightly later concrete poetry movement. There will be particular
emphasis on poetry, much of which we will read closely in class. Examples will likely come from Turkey,
Lebanon, Morocco, Algeria, Brazil, Scotland, Ireland, England, The United States, Russia, Germany, France, The
Francophone Caribbean (Martinique), Switzerland, Greece, Italy, and Iraq.
The class will help students learn both to read poetry closely, and to consider its possible roles (and the roles of
literature more generally) within intellectual and social history. We will also consider literature’s relation to other
fields in the humanities including anthropology, history, political science, philosophy and art history. Our main text
will be the three volumes of Jerome Rothenberg’s and Pierre Joris’s anthology Poems for the Millennium.
** THREE WEEK INTENSIVE COURSE, WILL RUN FROM MAY 21 ST - JUNE 11 TH .**
Course Days/Times: MTW, 9:30-1:25PM, First Session Instructor: Lytle Shaw
ENGL-UA 412 Shakespeare and Elizabethan Theatre
This course will examine eight of the most famous plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater, including both
Shakespeare's plays and other works of drama of the late 16th and early 17th century. Genres we will read include
revenge tragedies, city comedies, romance, and history. In reading Shakespeare's plays alongside the work of other
dramatists of the period, we will come to a greater understanding of the rich variety of Elizabethan drama and of the
dynamics of influence in place in the early modern theaters. Among the non-Shakespearean dramatists we will read
are Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, and Francis Beaumont.
Course Days/Times: TWR, 3:30-5:40PM, Second Session Instructor: Liza Blake
ENGL-UA 712 Major Texts in Critical Theory
As the late critic Edward Said insisted, “literary criticism has always contained some sense of its place in the
process of human history.” But in our moment of increasing ecological disaster, is a sense of criticism's place in
human history enough? This course will provide an introduction to major texts from a long history of critical theory

Updated: 03-19-12
(from the Presocratics to Derrida) through basic questions about the responsibilities and function of criticism. In
particular, we will explore how criticism affects and is affected by phenomena beyond those of human making. The
course will introduce foundational texts of Classical and Medieval critical thought alongside enlightenment
philosophy, phenomenology, deconstruction, feminism, queer theory, 'thing theory' and the recent 'speculative
realism' movement.
Course Days/Times: MTR, 12:30-2:40PM, Second Session Instructor: Daniel Remein
ENGL-UA 728 Science Fiction
Considers contemporary science fiction as literature, social commentary, prophecy, and a reflection of recent and
possible future trends in technology and society. Writers considered include such authors as Isaac Asimov, J. G.
Ballard, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clark, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, Frank
Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.
Course Days/Times: MTR, 1:15-3:25PM, First Session Instructor: Eliot Borenstein
ENGL-UA 755
Representations of Women
Eve: the fallen woman. Lucrece: the chaste wife. Cleopatra: the African temptress.
Blurring the boundary between history and myth, these three women have inspired paintings, sculptures, histories,
drama, poems, musical compositions, and films. We will examine representations of Eve, Lucrece, and Cleopatra
from all of these categories and more to explore how these three women have come to represent very different types
of femininity. In addition to looking at renditions of their stories across place and time, we will ask questions of the
genres and media we encounter: how do the vehicles in which representations are made change the way we react to
and analyze those representations? Do we respond differently to poems and paintings, films and operas, blogs and
epics? And what are the politics and cultural assumptions implicit in an artist‟s choice of genre and medium to
represent an icon of womanhood? Objects of study will include literary and historical texts by Plutarch,
Shakespeare, Christina Rossetti, and Ursula K. Le Guin; as well as visual, musical, cinematic and other works by
Rembrandt, Benjamin Britten, Paul Anka, Samara Weiss, Tamara de Lempicka, and the National Geographic
Society. In addition to investigating the histories of Eve, Lucrece, and Cleopatra, the goals of the course include
understanding genres as shifting models, rather than fixed categories; questioning assumptions about the political
and cultural value of different genres and media; and challenging the generic norms of academic work by working
collaboratively and merging criticism and analysis with creative practices. Assignments for this course will require
student collaboration and a balance between critical and creative modes. Students will be encouraged to work
outside the traditional genres of academic work—i.e. the standard, singly-written literary analysis paper—and to
develop their projects using collaborative thinking and generic flexibility.
Course Times/Days: MTW, 3:30-5:40PM, First Session, Instructors: Q. Sarah Ostendorf, Johanna
Devereaux